[1] He was born in a village in the forested Dalarna province, and grew up in poverty; his father was a primary school teacher, taking odd jobs to try to earn enough money to live on.

Det är bara Olle spelman, susar tall och sjunger gran, han har lyktat sina hemlösa år.

But as blackly rocks the coffin through the woods in springtime green silence moves through farm plots woken by the dawn, and the west wind stops a moment to make out with senses keen who through roses took steps heavy and forlorn.

[18] As early as 1922, the author Torsten Fogelqvist [sv] wrote that Andersson's poems, especially those of Svarta ballader, were the most artistically distinctive of his works, and predicted that the book would be an essential item for scholars of modern literature.

In addition, he writes, the poems convey strong, simple feelings about the deepest questions of existence: life's struggles against adversity, love, hate, suffering, and death.

He notes that Andersson adds to this a frame of nature-romanticism with a strong wild country mysticism and the Dalarna region's many exotic Finnish names for rivers, lakes, and villages.

A central figure in Svarta ballader is the musician, who he notes is close to Andersson, appearing in "Omkring Tiggarn från Luossa", "En spelmans jordafärd", "Spelmannen", and "Karis-Janken".

In what he considers the best poems in the collection, "Omkring Tiggarn från Luossa" and "Gillet på vinden", a note is struck which combines Christian longing for eternity with Indian nirvana mysticism.

[20] Lena Marklund, on the literary Project Runeberg, wrote that Svarta ballader marked Andersson's transition from the concrete descriptions in his earlier books of poems to the metaphysical.

He continued to write poems about the wild countryside ("vildmarkspoesi"), but by focussing on solitary and ragged figures, he was able to use their life struggles in a hard world to provide an answer to metaphysical questions.

In her view, he made use of every imaginable effect to express the unsayable, from typography and unfamiliar Finnish placenames to romantic phrases like "the darkest dark" and musical resonances.

However, Marklund states, the deepest feature of Svarta ballader is Andersson's inner determination to free himself from a traditional view of God tied up with sin, grace, and penance.